LOG IN

HOME PODCAST BLOG ABOUT JOIN DONATE STORE CONTACT MAILING LIST

SEARCH...

Ep. 266: Jonathan Lear’s Plato: Psyche and Society (Part One)
March 29, 2021 by Mark Linsenmayer — 2 Comments

00:00 00:00

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:39 — 51.9MB)

Subscribe to get Part 2 of this episode. Listen to a preview. Hear this part ad-free.

On essays from Lear's Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of

the Soul (1988), featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth.

Sponsors: Get $200 off a mattress and two free pillows at

HelixSleep.com/PEL. Get 50% off The New Yorker and a free
tote bag at NewYorker.com/PEL. See headspace.com/PEL for
a free month's access to a library of guided meditations. Learn
about St. John's College at SJC.edu.

How does Plato's philosophy hold together, and is it still

something we can make use of in the modern age? Our recent
explorations of Plato's Timaeus and Phaedo showed us how
humanity is supposed to t into the cosmos, but the details
seemed hopelessly archaic: The Theory of Forms is
problematic, and there don't seem any convincing, well-
grounded reasons to believe in Plato's optimally harmonious
world. But if Plato's purpose was ethical, then Socrates' mythical stories might be more about putting us in the right
frame of mind to live in a just and healthy fashion.

Jonathan Lear applies his psychoanalytic training to help modernize Plato, and we read three of his essays: "Inside
and Outside the Republic," "Eros and Unknowing: The Psychoanalytic Signi cance of Plato’s Symposium," and "An
Interpretation of Transference," which starts off by comparing Socrates' questioning with psychotherapy. LOG IN
The connecting thread between these essays (which are chapters 10, 7, and 4 of Open Minded respectively; we also
read the introductory rst chapter, "The King and I") is the connection between the individual human mind and the
world that we collectively create, and it's very useful to connect Lear's analysis to our social construction episodes
(starting with ep. 227). Plato's Republic stresses the importance of proper upbringing of citizens, because this is
how we're constructed as social animals, how we internalize our culture (see also our recent Dewey on education
episode). This internalization continues throughout our lives in various ways. What's trickier to describe is
externalization, where through our habits, our artworks, our speech we contribute back to the culture's ongoing
evolution. According to Plato, the character of a state emerges from the character of its citizens and vice versa.

Lear defends the Republic against charges that the relation between psyche and polis (i.e. mind and society) is
merely an analogy, and a question-begging one at that. Bernard Williams described this analogy as papering over the
fundamentally oppressive character of Plato's ideal state. An individual person is one according to Plato where the
rational part of the soul (the logos) is rmly in charge of the appetitive (eros) and honor-seeking (thymos) parts.
These parts are necessary to motivate us to eat, reproduce, and ght in defense of family and state, but they
shouldn't be making any of our decisions. Plato describes this result as a harmonious soul, a just soul, since it's
reason that understands justice and will put these capacities to their best use.

But famously, if you analogize this to people and say that some people are fundamentally appetitive and so properly
should be doing menial work, and some others are fundamentally thymotic and so should be the guardians, then
these groups both get ruled by the wise philosopher-king class, and really, none of us today wants that kind of world.

Williams argued that in order for the lower classes to understand that they need to obey, they'd actually have to be
reasonable enough. But does that mean that our "gut" (the seat of eros in the Timaeus) needs to also have a
reasoning part? This is one of the many ways that the analogy falls apart. Another example: Plato criticized the
democratic state as too diverse to have direction; it's always pulling this way and that in con ict with itself. Plato
also described the state as determined by the character of its members, so that should mean that the individual
citizens are also "too diverse," but this really makes no sense, as diversity is a matter of different citizens having
different characters, not a matter of each citizen having different characters.

Lear's essay on the Republic responds by saying that the relationship between soul and society is not analogical but
this literal, causal, metabolic process of internalization and externalization that I've described. One misleading factor
is that we only notice that the parts of the soul are different when they're in con ict, but of course they're not usually
in con ict at all; most of us are not at constant war with ourselves. As Socrates describes in the Phaedo, the truly
temperate person is not someone who has these strong urges that they're constantly having to tamp down, but
someone who's been habituated to not have these urges at all. So the eros-dominated person in society is not one
who is ceaselessly seeking to satisfy their pleasure, but one who has been educated to only have essential desires,
not frivolous or excessive ones, and who uses rationality to maximize pleasure by being able to put off some
pleasures in service of greater pleasure overall. Such a person does use rationality, then, despite still being
dominated overall by personal desire, and can rationally acknowledge that it's those who are wise at ruling who
should actually rule.
For Lear, the way we can tell if a personal way of balancing yourself makes sense is whether it can be externalized
LOG INto
a coherent society. Plato's analysis of the democratic citizen is that they don't have a strong will, that they are pulled
hither and thither by any in uence that comes along. That really is a self-con icted individual, and when externalized
to a society, we get the whimsical democracy that Plato warned us against. A tyrannical individual soul is one who is
really a servant of their own desires, and when this is externalized, you get a society with a tyrant at the top, i.e. this
tyrannical soul, and everyone else oppressed into serving those desires. It's only the just, well-balanced soul, at
peace with itself that can be externalized into a just society according to Plato.

Lear compares the three parts of the soul for Plato to Freud's three parts of the psyche and correlates the
development of those three parts for Freud from a more primitive picture of conscious vs. unconscious to the
development from Socrates' view where there's just a person and their mutually contradictory beliefs (or more
broadly, the mind's rationality against the unreason of the body) to Plato's view of parts of the soul that help to
explain some of our con icts.

Lear's essay on The Symposium adds to this picture by meditating on eros and its role in supposedly connecting us
to the divine. While in The Republic, eros is just the desiring part of the soul, in Socrates' speech in Symposium, eros
is the messenger to the divine; it can self-transcend as our merely animal lust points the way to appreciating beauty
not just embodied in an individual but the Form of Beauty itself. As Lear tells it, this picture is undermined in the
dialogue when Alcibiades, presented as the incarnation of beauty (i.e. he was super hot), stumbles drunkenly into the
party and praises Socrates even as he says that he's unable to commit to following Socrates' teachings.

This according to Lear is not just the comedy it reads as, but is also tragedy: Eros tries to catch the divine but is
continually unable to do so, much like the half-beings Aristophanes--in his speech earlier in the dialogue--describes
as constantly searching for their other half, so sex is an attempt to biologically merge that is inevitably unsuccessful.

In The Timaeus, the emphasis was the harmony of the universe, but Plato (through the character of Timaeus)
admitted that yes, of course there is suffering, and plenty of opportunities for things to go out of balance. These are
just inevitable byproducts of being embodied in the rst place, and the only escape from them is (per The Phaedo) to
live and then die as a philosopher. But what if instead of evaluating the plausibility of Plato's grand visions of the
universe and the afterlife, we diagnose them? One process of externalization is putting forward explanations for
things, and the primary form for this is not scienti c theory but storytelling: We paint the world to make it a sensible
place to live in. So the attempt to depict the world as ultimately harmonious and these problems we run into as just
blips in an optimal grand scheme is an attempt to live with and grapple with suffering.

What Lear argues against in Open Minded is not that such externalization is bad. It can't be; it's a fundamental way
we move in the world. However, when it becomes dogma, when it is no longer useful for the situations we have to
cope with, when it causes con ict with other people, then to be open minded is to be able to put such
externalizations aside to make way for new ones. In his introductory chapter he anticipates the objections of hard-
nosed analytic philosophers to anything Freudian, or Lacanian, or having to do with any of the other parts of
philosophy that many nd suspect, to be "not real philosophy." We can't let the desire for rigor, for high academic
standards, rule out in advance whole theoretical frameworks like psychoanalysis, Marxism, or post-structuralism
that many have found very useful. We can't make excuses for being ignorant of these thinkers. Lear speci cally
criticizes Karl Popper's approach whereby you simply ask "is the theory falsi able given appropriate evidence?" and
then dismiss these tools as unscienti c and hence useless. Lear's thinking provides a model that involves both
analytic philosophy and more "literary" thinking that reinterprets both Plato and Freud to try to make them more
LOG IN
palatable and useful to us now.

In the case of The Symposium, Lear's essay focuses on a comment right toward the end that a great playwright
should be able to write both comedy and tragedy. Lear interprets this as an invitation to read Plato's dialogue itself
as both comic and tragic alternately, and so emphasizes as I've said both the explicit, harmonious view of eros
connecting us to the divine and the implicit discord between eros (desire) and leading a good life, which is stated
explicitly in The Republic. I think this is supposed to tell us something about how we run aground against our own
externalizations, which is a common theme throughout these essays.

The essay on transference describes how this commonly discussed phenomenon in therapy whereby a patient
transfers emotions felt for parents or others onto the analyst is a type of externalization. We normally see the
patient's attitude here as simply mistaken, but because externalization is literally how we build the social world, it's
not just a matter of confusing true with false but part of the dynamics of creating what truth is, and the relation
between the image of the world, including society, that each of erects (our private "idiopolis") and the shared social
vision that constitutes society is complex.

To engage in transference (in other essays, Lear uses the term "phantasy" to capture similar phenomena) is to put
forth a social proposition, which in the case with the analyst is "we are lovers" or "we are enemies" (or both). The
proper response for the analyst is of course to deny both of these and to instead help the patient understand the
social move being made.

Socrates, according to Lear, did not understand transference. Socrates' method of questioning is supposed to help
people, and it's part of Socratic doctrine that people don't like being hurt and know and appreciate when they're
being helped. Yet the Athenian people that Socrates were trying to help felt attacked, and they transferred that rage
(which should have been directed against their own inconsistency and other aws) back at Socrates himself, putting
him to death.

Alcibiades in The Symposium accuses Socrates of being his tormentor: His lover who frustrates him, who he can't
look away from but also can't follow the way they both would like. Socrates should have in this case been a good
therapist and understood that this was all Alcibiades' problem, and worked to help him, but instead he plays along
with the farce and (according to Lear) ultimately doesn't care about the plight of people who can't put their rationality
in charge of their behavior and follow him along the philosophers' path. This is tragic, according to Lear; Alcibiades
famously betrayed Athens.

In both of these cases, by Lear's diagnosis the Athenian experiment in democracy failed because of its inability to
appreciate and follow Socrates' advice, the implication being that we are always in danger of failing in our social
goals because of a lack of understanding of ourselves and how we work together, and so this is what Lear hopes to
help remedy in giving us the analyses that he does through his essays, just as he tries to help his psychoanalytic
patients individually and directly.

Buy the book or it looks like you can borrow it online. The Bernard Williams article is "The Analogy of City and Soul
in Plato’s Republic" (1973).

Image by Genevieve Arnold. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop (and Mark).

 by
LOG IN
Filed Under: Podcast Episodes
Tagged With: Jonathan Lear, philosophy podcast, Plato, psychoanalysis, social construction

Comments

Edwin Walker says

April 2, 2021 at 4:14 pm

John Dewey discusses The Republic in his essay The Ethics of Democracy, 1889, available here:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/186042063/DEWEY-John-1888-the-Ethics-of-Democracy
Starting about page 19, Dewey gives an analysis that is similar Lear’s ideas as discussed in the podcast:

“The question of the Republic is as to the ideal

of men’s conduct; the answer is such a development of
man’s nature as brings him into complete harmony with
the universe of spiritual relations, or, in Platonic language,
the state. This universe, in turn, is man writ large; it is
the manifestation, the realization of the capacities of the
individual. Such a development of the individual that
he shall be in harmony with all others in the state, that is,
that he shall possess as his own the uni ed will of the
community; that is the end both of politics and of ethics.
Nothing could be more aside from the mark than to say
that the Platonic ideal subordinates and sacri ces the individual
to the state. It does, indeed, hold that the individual
can be what he ought to be, can become what, in
idea, he is, only as a member of a spiritual organism,
called by Plato the state, and, in losing his own individual
will, acquiring that of this larger reality. But’this is not
loss of selfhold or personality, it is its realization. The
individual is not sacri ced; he is brought .to reality in
the state.
We certainly can not nd here any ground upon
which to distinguish the aristocratic from the democratic
 ideal. But we have not asked how this unity of the individual LOG IN
and the universe, this perfect man in the perfect
state, is to be brought about. Here lies the distinction
sought for; it is not a question of end, but of means.
According to Plato (and the aristocratic idea everywhere),
the multitude is incapable of forming such an
ideal and of attempting to reach it. Plato is the true author
of the doctrine of the ” remnant.” There is, in his
words, “no chance of perfection either in states or in individuals
until a necessity is laid upon the small class of
caring for the state.”

This leads Dewey to his justi cation for democracy.

Reply

Edwin Walker says

April 2, 2021 at 4:18 pm

Two thoughts.
1. Philosophy is always a discussion. It involves living people arguing with other living people, or with the
traces left by those who came before us. That makes writers like Lear, and your discussion of Lear,
valuable contributions. That was like a three-sided conversation, one group of podcasters with two writers
neither of whom was present. I think it’s valuable, and will happily listen to any conversation you choose to
have with anyone.

2. Dewey was a really smart guy, with an American perspective. We all could use more Dewey in our lives..

Reply

Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published. Required elds are marked *

Comment
 LOG IN

Name *

Email *

Website

 Yes, please add me to your mailing list (for an occasional announcement or newsletter)

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

POST COMMENT

CITIZENSHIP HAS ITS BENEFITS

Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to

all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free,
including exclusive Part 2's for episodes
starting September 2020; our after-show
Nightcap, where the guys respond to
listener email and chat more causally; a
community of fellow learners, and more.

RATE AND REVIEW

 LOG IN

NIGHTCAP

On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to

listener email and chat more casually
about their lives, the making of the show,
current events and politics, and anything
else that happens to come up.

SUBSCRIBE TO EMAIL UPDATES

EMAIL ADDRESS *

SUBSCRIBE

Select list(s):
Monthly Newsletter
Weekly Episode/Post Updates

SUPPORT PEL
Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few
shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

RECENT COMMENTS
eeenok on Lucifer: How a Decent Deity
Got a Bad Rap (Part 3)

Albi Bilali on PEL Nightcap Early April 2021

Jennifer Tejada on PEL Nightcap Early

April 2021

Evan Hadkins on PEL Nightcap Early April

2021

Edwin Walker on Ep. 266: Jonathan Lear’s

Plato: Psyche and Society (Part One)
 LOG IN

ABOUT THE PARTIALLY EXAMINED LIFE BLOG POST CATEGORIES

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by (sub)Text

some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy
Aftershow
for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we
pick a text and chat about it with some balance between Announcements
insight and ippancy. You don’t have to know any
Audiobook
philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking
about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the Book Excerpts
discussion Citizen Content

Citizen Document

BECOME A PEL CITIZEN! Citizen News

Close Reading
As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social
community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial Combat and Classics
examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups
Constellary Tales
dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively
forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, Featured Article
and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast
General Announcements
transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music,
and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join. Interview

Letter to the Editor

Misc. Philosophical Musings

Nakedly Examined Music Podcast

Nakedly Self-Examined Music

NEM Bonus

Not School Recording

Not School Report

Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts

PEL Music

PEL Nightcap

PEL's Notes

Personal Philosophies

Phi Fic Podcast

Podcast Episode (Citizen)

Podcast Episodes

Pretty Much Pop

 Reviewage
LOG IN
Song Self-Exam

Things to Watch

Vintage Episode (Citizen)

Web Detritus

FOLLOW:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2021 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy
Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in